Customers really had no way to know this would happen. See -
NorthPoint's Bankruptcy Burns Customers: After Verizon scuttled a pending merger, the DSL provider strong-armed customers to keep them from leaving - but now it's leaving them high and dry.
Northpoint lied to ISPs and threatened legal action if they tried to switch customers. Most end customers probably had no idea this was going on since their contracts were with their ISP not Northpoint. Those that did know of Northpoint's problems had a reasonable expectation that their service would continue in some form when Northpoint was sold.
The original poster's attitude is reflective of much of the Ayn Rand-ish liberatarian capitalist drivel seen all too often on Slashdot. Northpoint applied for and obtained licenses from state PUCs around the country that allowed them to operate what is legally considered a utility. It definitely does have legal obligations to it's customers, including the obligation of notice of termination. Now if Northpoint had simply run out of cash and had no buyer at all, those obligations would be moot for all practical purposes. That is not what happened here. AT&Ts purchase of Northpoint was conducted under the auspices of a bankruptcy court which apparently chose to disregard Northpoint's legal obligations to it's customers. I am sure that the court felt is was correct in doing so as bankruptcy courts generally only consider the interests of creditors, but this does point to a serious disconnect public utility licensing and bankruptcy laws. The court should have factored in the cost of giving customers proper notice into the overall settlement with Northpoints creditors. DSL customers did not deserve what they got. If anyone did it was the investors and banks who poured millions into what was apparently a very poorly run business.
Nice advice, but you have obvously never run a bootstrapped start-up company and had to make choices between paying for redundant connections and paying staff. It's one thing to accept that SDSL is inherently less reliable than say a T1 and be willing to live with risk of occasional downtime. It is quite another to be cut off completely for 3-4 weeks.
One week warning. 30-45 day lead time for new DSL/T1 orders. Do the math....
Lose the attitude. Lots of people are getting hurt here and it is NOT their fault.
Business DSL, Business DSL, Business DSL.. get it? This is not a minor inconvenience for businesses. With 30-45 day lead times for most any braodband alternative except cable this leaves many businesses including mine seriously screwed. Our office is dark now, we'll be working from home cable connections until Megapath can switch us to Rhythms and/or we get business cable installed. Far from being a inconvenience, this is shaping up as one of the worst user disasters in the brief life of the commerical Internet. Over 100,000 broadband connections going dark across the country representing many more users. There have been outages affecting far more users but not for 3-4 weeks.
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Customers really had no way to know this would happen. See - NorthPoint's Bankruptcy Burns Customers: After Verizon scuttled a pending merger, the DSL provider strong-armed customers to keep them from leaving - but now it's leaving them high and dry. Northpoint lied to ISPs and threatened legal action if they tried to switch customers. Most end customers probably had no idea this was going on since their contracts were with their ISP not Northpoint. Those that did know of Northpoint's problems had a reasonable expectation that their service would continue in some form when Northpoint was sold. The original poster's attitude is reflective of much of the Ayn Rand-ish liberatarian capitalist drivel seen all too often on Slashdot. Northpoint applied for and obtained licenses from state PUCs around the country that allowed them to operate what is legally considered a utility. It definitely does have legal obligations to it's customers, including the obligation of notice of termination. Now if Northpoint had simply run out of cash and had no buyer at all, those obligations would be moot for all practical purposes. That is not what happened here. AT&Ts purchase of Northpoint was conducted under the auspices of a bankruptcy court which apparently chose to disregard Northpoint's legal obligations to it's customers. I am sure that the court felt is was correct in doing so as bankruptcy courts generally only consider the interests of creditors, but this does point to a serious disconnect public utility licensing and bankruptcy laws. The court should have factored in the cost of giving customers proper notice into the overall settlement with Northpoints creditors. DSL customers did not deserve what they got. If anyone did it was the investors and banks who poured millions into what was apparently a very poorly run business.
Nice advice, but you have obvously never run a bootstrapped start-up company and had to make choices between paying for redundant connections and paying staff. It's one thing to accept that SDSL is inherently less reliable than say a T1 and be willing to live with risk of occasional downtime. It is quite another to be cut off completely for 3-4 weeks.
One week warning. 30-45 day lead time for new DSL/T1 orders. Do the math.... Lose the attitude. Lots of people are getting hurt here and it is NOT their fault.
Business DSL, Business DSL, Business DSL.. get it? This is not a minor inconvenience for businesses. With 30-45 day lead times for most any braodband alternative except cable this leaves many businesses including mine seriously screwed. Our office is dark now, we'll be working from home cable connections until Megapath can switch us to Rhythms and/or we get business cable installed. Far from being a inconvenience, this is shaping up as one of the worst user disasters in the brief life of the commerical Internet. Over 100,000 broadband connections going dark across the country representing many more users. There have been outages affecting far more users but not for 3-4 weeks.